Defense Secretary Ash Carter appeared in Cambridge on Tuesday to formally open the second office of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other office is in Mountain View, California, near the tech center of Silicon Valley.

The roughly year-old DIUx program is meant to help the military better identify emerging technologies.

Carter says the Department of Defense must be more innovative to stay ahead of its competitors and that DIUx was created to “push our existing bureaucracy to do better.”

Massachusetts is the first stop in a three-day trip that will also take Carter to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the naval station in Great Lakes, Illinois.